478 EDUCATION 



widely, in ideals of mental training ; we may not agree as to what 

 kinds of knowledge and mental habits are the best ; but no one 

 will deny that a knowledge of what may be, and has been achieved 

 by mental training, and of the means best adapted to achieve any 

 desired result, would be a great advantage to the teacher. Every 

 one will agree also, in theory at any rate, that wide and useful 

 knowledge and high intelligence are desirable qualities, and that 

 ignorance and stupidity are not. Unfortunately, useful knowledge 

 and high intelligence are eulogistic terms which are applied by 

 different men to very unlike things. For example, the terms would 

 hardly have had the same meaning for Huxley and the curates 

 whose * cackling ' he abhorred. In his opinion the curates were 

 ignorant and unintelligent ; in their view his knowledge was not 

 right knowledge, and his intelligence damnable. 



785. We have seen that memory is nothing other than a power 

 of growing, of developing mentally under the stimulus of use, and 

 that on this faculty depends all thought, all intelligence, all mental 

 adaptability. Great intelligence must have for its basis a power, 

 correspondingly great, of profiting by experience; or, in other 

 words, a great memory. Man is intelligent because his memory is 

 very capacious. It contains not only such things as words, scenesj 

 events, and processes of reasoning, which can be recalled to 

 consciousness, but also dexterities, habits, bents, tendencies, tones, 

 and mental attitudes which cannot be consciously recalled or 

 pictured in the mind, but which are every whit as important. We 

 have seen also that, not only our * physical ' dexterities, such as 

 walking and the delicately co-ordinated movement of the lips and 

 tongue in speaking, but also such ' mental ' dexterities as are 

 involved in associating, comparing, discriminating, and reasoning 

 depend on memory. Lastly, we have to see that, just as the 

 instinct of sport impels the child to play with his limbs till he is 

 able to use them dexterously, so a homologous instinct impels him 

 to play with the contents of his conscious memory till he is able to 

 use them skilfully. Probably this impulse to play with the contents 

 of the conscious memory, to think, is the most imperious instinct 

 in our nature. At any rate, it is the one which is the most cease- 

 less in its promptings. A man may resist hunger, or thirst, or love, 

 or sleep, but not for a moment can he resist the impulse to think 

 the impulse to learn to use the contents of his conscious memory 

 skilfully and thereby store his unconscious memory. 



786. Prompted, then, by the instincts of play, curiosity, and 

 imitativeness, the child undertakes the earlier part of his own 



